Chapter eight: World War II and the Black West
BLACK WOMEN IN THE PORTLAND SHIPYARDS
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- Bu səhifədəki naviqasiya:
- SEX AND THE SHIPYARDS
- WHITE WOMEN AND BLACK MEN IN THE PORTLAND SHIPYARDS
- LYN CHILDS CONFRONTS A RACIST ACT
- ETTA GERMANY WRITES TO THE PRESIDENT
- NORTHEAST PORTLAND: THE GROWTH OF A BLACK COMMUNITY
- BLACK BUILDERS OF THE ALCAN HIGHWAY
- BLACKS, WHITES, ASIANS IN WORLD WAR II HAWAII
BLACK WOMEN IN THE PORTLAND SHIPYARDS The following account describes the workplace that greeted African American women who entered the Portland shipyards in World War II. The account below indicates that these women faced greater discrimination than black men in the yard. In April 1944 Margaret Bernard, an Alabama black woman, wrote to the Fair Employment Practices Committee complaining about racial discrimination in southern shipyards. "I would like to go to Tuskegee to learn Welding and Burning," Bernard wrote, "but I know if I did I would have to go up North in order to Weld or Burn." Margaret Bernard would have been disappointed if she had come north to the Portland and Vancouver shipyards. Racism pervaded the shipyards and the community. Black workers were attracted to the promise of shipyard jobs, but while the black population of Portland grew from 1,934 in 1940 to 22,000 at its wartime peak, racial discrimination remained a problem throughout the war. Discriminatory practices limited the number of black workers who gained access to skilled jobs. While the unions of unskilled workers admitted blacks, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers was the only union representing skilled workers that admitted black workers on an equal basis. The Boilermakers union established a separate black auxiliary whose members were not entitled to full union privileges, and the Kaiser management cooperated in firing workers who refused to join the black union... Statistics for the distribution of black women by craft and grade are available only for Kaiser Vancouver, which the Kaiser management highlighted during the FEPC trials since it hired the most black workers of the three Kaiser yards. Evidence from the shipyard newspapers, oral history interviews and the files of the FEPC strongly suggest that black women had even more difficulty penetrating the skilled trades than black men. Even the statistics of the Kaiser management for the Vancouver yard, which make no distinction between helper and journeyman, show that while women composed 31 percent of the black work force in 1943, they composed only 20 percent of black welders, 21 percent of black electricians, and a tiny percentage of other skilled trades. Virginia Lemire, the coordinator of women's services for the three Kaiser yards and the assistant personnel manager at Swan Island, claimed at the FEPC Hearings in November 1943 that black women were concentrated in unskilled jobs because most of them were unqualified and unsuited for skilled work. Both oral history recollections and the records of the Fair Employment Practice Committee demonstrate however, that black women were barred from skilled work regardless of qualifications or training. Beatrice Marshall, her sister, and her two friends were trained as steel-lathe and drill-press operators in a National Youth Administration (NYA) program in South Bend, Indiana, one of the several thousand NYA training programs that had been geared to meet the demands of defense industries for trained workers. Marshall loved learning to use machines. "I feel like I was a champion on the drill press, and I really did like it," she commented. The NYA paid the four women's train fare to Portland and put them up for the first night at the YWCA. They had brought their papers certifying that they had passed their tests in Indiana, and they were looking forward with excitement to working as shipyard machinists. Their hopes however, were soon dashed. "When we got to the shipyards, ready to apply for the work," Marshall recalled,
lathe or drill-press operators; and that we would have to either accept painter's helper or a sweeper...And we complained because that wasn't what we was trained for. And we asked for a job with what we was trained for. And they said it wasn't any available. After some persistence, Marshall and her friends got the personnel office to admit that there were openings in the machine shop but they were not accepting black workers. Statistics collected in 1943 show fifty black machinists working in the shipyards, but none of them were women. Marshall and her friends complained to the newly organized chapter of the Urban League but were unsuccessful in gaining admission to the machine shop, so they worked for a while as unskilled laborers and then left the shipyards. Marshall was hurt, angry, and confused. "They was doing all this advertising and wanting us to do this, and here I am spending time and getting trained and qualified and couldn't get it...I was real mad." Source: Amy Kesselman, Fleeting Opportunities; Women Shipyard Workers in Portland and Vancouver During World War II and Reconversion, (Albany, NY 1990), pp. 40, 41-42. SEX AND THE SHIPYARDS In the following vignette, Katherine Archibald, a University of California researcher, recounted her white shipyard worker fears about interracial sex clouded any attempted friendship between white women and black men in the yards. The ancient fear of despoliation of women of the privileged race by men of inferior blood, which has played so large a part in the establishment and elaboration of caste systems in all societies, prevailed in the shipyard as well. A rumor was almost always afloat of some attempt by a Negro to satisfy his presumably constant sex hunger for the woman of white skin. There were tales of surreptitious pinchings and maulings in the secluded corners of the hulls, and of successful sexual attacks in the dark streets of the Negro section and in the housing units where Negroes and whites lived in close proximity. I was never able to verify these accounts, but they were invariably accepted as factual and worthy of repetition for their salacious interest and inflammatory value. The Okies were especially disturbed and found it hard to accept the casual contact between Negro men and white women to which Northern custom had long been indifferent--sitting together on streetcars and buses, standing together before lunch counters or pay windows, working side by side in the same gangs. Ordinary association enforced upon the two races by shipyard work and living was actively disapproved by those who were accustomed to rigid lines of separation, and open protests were occasionally made by an incensed individual... Few insults in shipyard parlance were more searing than "nigger-lover." A white man who sought the company of Negro women was exposed to scorn and partial ostracism. But the scorn was immeasurably multiplied when it was a white woman who desired or passively admitted the Negro’s amorous attentions. With startling swiftness the anger of a race would gather and concentrate upon this one instance of desertion and betrayal. Just such fury spread over the hull on which I chanced to be at work one quiet afternoon when two young white girls, who were stringing cable next to a group of Negro machinists, chose to be as friendly with them as they would have been with a similar neighboring group of white boys. From mouth to mouth the story ran; probable objectors were hurried to the spot to observe for themselves and in turn to stoke the flames of indignation. Threats of public disgrace for the girls were becoming loudly vocal, and expressions of intent to expel them from the hull by force or to subject them to more memorable and brutal violence were crowding on the verge of positive action, when the decisive summons of the quitting whistle put a fortunate end both to the flirtation and to the clamor for punishment. In the face of these attitudes no white woman, even if she wanted to, could establish normal friendly relations with a Negro man, or even talk with him at length on any topic. Contact of this type, no matter what its actual substance, was immediately translated by the onlooker into sexual terms. On the one occasion when I chanced to have a long and public conversation with a Negro man, the reaction of the shipyard audience was immediate and unequivocal. "Well, when's the wedding going to be?" a bystander inquired of me, and for days a trail of insinuation followed after the simple occurrence. White workers would admit no halfway point between the Negro's allotted role of servile, silent distance from the white woman and the intimacies of sexual union...
At the FEPC hearings, Elmer Hann, general supervisor at Swan Island, testified that white women were afraid to work with black male workers. "They really don't know, I guess, what they are afraid of, it just seems to be the inborn nature of a woman and lack of social contact, perhaps, that makes them just a little reticent to be isolated with these people." But white women attempting to increase their social contact with black men in the yards or the community raised eyebrows and could provoke repercussions. After an interracial dance in Vanport, one of the few racially integrated housing projects in the city, the police issued a warning to white women who had been seen dancing with black men that continuing this practice might lead to a race riot. Doris Avshalomov often had lunch with a friend from Reed College and some black students from a southern college. Some of the white workers would sort of come by and make comments at us--noises. And one night they pulled the lights out of the place where we were sitting. You know, just real annoying things. And finally, my crew leader told me that his superior wanted to talk to me. And his superior--I will give him credit, he was embarrassed, but he said that some people misunderstood the fact that I was just having lunch with these people, and that he just thought we should all just join hands and put our shoulder to the wheel and avoid any kind of disturbance of that sort. And I was just furious....It was just sort of comradely thing. The only people who ever made unwelcome advances to me were white men in the shipyards--but I didn't see my leaderman talking to me about that!
"You so-in-so. If you go lift one more foot, I'll cut your guts out." That was my exact words. I was so mad with him. Then he started to tell me that he had been trained in boot camp that any national group who was darkskinned was beneath all White People. So he started to cry. I felt sorry for him, because he was crying, really crying. He was frightened, and I was frightened. I didn't know what I was doing, so in the end I turned my torch off and I sat down on the steps with him. About that time the intercom on board the ship started to announce, "Lyn Childs, report to Colonel Hickman immediately." So I said, "I guess this is it." So I went up to Colonel Hickman's office, and behind me came all these men, and there lined up behind me, and I said, "Where are you guys going?" They said, "We're going with you." When we got to the office [Colonel Hickman] said, "I just wanted to see Lyn Childs," and they said, "You'll see all of us, because we were all down there. We all did not have the guts enough to do what she did, [but] we're with her." Colonel Hickman said, "Come into this office." He had one of the guards take me into the office real fast and closed the door real fast and kept them out, and he said, "What kind of communist activity are you carrying on down there?" I said, "A communist! What is that?" He said, "You know what I am talking about. You're a communist." I said, "A communist! Forget you! The kind of treatment that man was putting on the Filipinos, and to come to their rescue. Then I am the biggest communist you ever seen in your life. That is great. I am a communist." He said, "Don't say that so loud." I said, "Well, you asked me was I a communist. You're saying I am. I'm saying I'm a... "Shh! Shh! Shh! Hush! Don't say that so loud." Then he said, "I think you ought to get back to work." "Well, you called me Why did you call me?" "Never mind what I called you for," he said, "Go back to work." Source: Paul R. Spickard, "Work and Hope: African American Women in Southern California During World War II," Journal of the West 32:3 (July 1993):74-75. ETTA GERMANY WRITES TO THE PRESIDENT African American migrants who found work in west coast shipyards encountered the hostile unions which after unsuccessful attempts to bar their employment, resorted to segregating them (and white women) into auxiliary locals. Etta Germany, a black shipyard worker in Richmond wrote directly to President Franklin Roosevelt to protest the discrimination directed against her and other African American shipyard workers. Her letter is reprinted below. Mr. President Honorable Sir, I wish to call your attention to a very disgraceful and UnAmerican situation that now exists in the Boilermakers and Welders Union Local 513 of Richmond, California. I am a Negro girl. Three weeks ago I and lots of others enrolled in the National Defense Training Classes to become welders. I applied for a job at the yards several times. But each time myself and others of my race were give the run around.... [Be]cause of being Negro I was not allowed to join the Union. Now Mr. President there are a great many Negroes in Defense Training as myself who upon completion of the course will be subjected to the same treatment as myself... We are all doing what we can to assist in winning the war. I sincerely feel that this is no time for our very own fellow citizens to use discrimination of this type.... Mrs. Etta Germany Source: Selected Documents from the Records of the Committee on Fair Employment Practice Field Records, Region XII, Reel 108, Complaints Against Boilermakers File. NORTHEAST PORTLAND: THE GROWTH OF A BLACK COMMUNITY When historians discuss the rise of segregated northern black communities they understandably focus on the largest cities--New York, Chicago, Los Angeles. But many of the trends in such cities were evident in smaller locales such as Portland, Oregon. Portland's black community dates back to the 1850s but by World War II it along with other west coast cities saw an influx of African Americans. By 1945, Portland had 22,000 blacks who overwhelmed the pre-1940 black population of 1,931. The following vignettes trace the rise of the 20th Century black community in Portland. The first two vignettes are part of editorials which appeared in local African American newspapers, the Portland Advocate, and Portland Observer. The third is from a special report on black Portland published in the Portland City Club Bulletin. We all know what residential segregation means. It means poor housing, bad streets, deficient lighting. It also means separate schools, and their attendant shortcomings.... It is segregation that is the root of all interracial troubles. We think that many of us will live to see in Portland the spectacle of separate schools and all the rest of the segregation as practiced now in the South. It is reasonable to expect it in the wake of residential segregation. Portland Advocate, July 12, 1930 * * * In Portland the Negro people are passively witnessing the development of a first rate ghetto with all the potential for squalor, poverty, juvenile delinquency and crime... It is obvious that the herding of Negroes into the district extending from Russell Street to the Steel Bridge and from Union Avenue to the river front portends economic and social problems of far reaching significance for this city. The struggle to get a more equitable housing arrangement for all minorities will require the undivided attention of all socially conscious minority group leaders. Portland Observer, July 20, 1945 * * * Over fifty percent of Portland's 11,000 Negroes are concentrated in census tracts 22 and 23, better known as the Albina district....one small area in the city which is about two miles long and one mile wide.... Living conditions in the Albina district are more crowded today than ten years ago.... In confining a majority of its Negroes to a restricted section of the city, Portland has forced them to live in crowded, ancient, unhealthy and wholly inadequate dwellings.... Confinement to an inferior and relatively unattractive neighborhood is a daily reminder of the prejudice of the white majority, and constant reinforcement of feelings of inferiority and resentment. Portland City Club Bulletin, April 19, 1957 BLACK BUILDERS OF THE ALCAN HIGHWAY The vignette below describes the black soldiers who helped build the Alaska Highway during World War II. The construction of the Alcan (now called the Alaska Highway) has been likened to the building of the Panama Canal. Most experts predicted it could not be done. Its route through the unmapped Canadian Rockies spanned some of the coldest, toughest, least explored country in North America. Yet the Corps of Engineers pushed through a 1,500 mile pioneer road linking Alaska to the outside world in just eight months and twelve days. One-third of the 10,607 soldiers who built it were black. The Alaska section was built solely by black troops of the 97th Regiment under white officers. The 388th, another Afro-American regiment of about 1,250 Corps of Engineer recruits was employed building a spur road off the Alcan near Whitehorse to [the] Norman Well oil fields in the Northwest Territories. And the 93rd and 95th regiments of black troops worked on the road north from Dawson Creek. Yet black troops were, for the most part, invisible and the considerable mark they left on American history was--until recently--unrecorded. Building the Alcan was considered crucial because the Japanese Navy threatened American's west coast shipping lanes and there was no land link to important U.S. military bases in the north. So Brig. General Clarence Sturdevant was apologetic when he broke the news that he was sending black regiments north to Gen. Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., all powerful head of the U.S. Army in Alaska: "I have heard that you object to having colored troops in Alaska and we have attempted to avoid sending them. However, we have been forced to use two colored regiments and it seem unwise for diplomatic reasons to use them both in Canada since the Canadians also prefer whites." Buckner, son of a Confederate general who surrendered to Grant, detailed his objections in writing and they had little to do with worries of competency: "The thing which I have opposed...has been their [black troops] establishment as port troops for the unloading of transports at our docks. The very high wages offered to unskilled labor here would attract a large number of them and cause them to...settle after the war, with the natural result that they would interbreed with the Indians and Eskimos and produce an objectionable race of mongrels which would be a problem from now on." To placate Buckner, it was agreed that black troops would not be allowed near any Alaskan settlements. The promise was adhered to so strictly that very few residents in Fairbanks and Big Delta, Alaska's two major Alcan outposts, ever realized blacks were in the area and press coverage of the sticky situation was not encouraged... [The troops'] first winter (1942-43) was one of the worst on record... Alexander Powell remembers days as a crane operator for the 97th when temperatures dropped to seventy below. "We wore three pairs of socks at time, with rubber galoshes instead of shoes because the leather would freeze. We had adequate cloth-lined parkas, pants, mittens and heavy underwear, but it still was mighty cold," he recalls. "But I was a young man who felt he had a job to do, and I did it. Walter E. Mason's A company of the 97th built 295 miles of road through stunted forest from Slana, across the Tanana River and then south into Canada. Eighty-five miles of that was corduroy road topped with felled trees--in some places five layers deep to counter the permafrost. Mason and his men bucked winter temperatures as low as seventy degrees below zero, living in tents, existing mainly on dehydrated potatoes, Vienna sausage, Spam and whatever game they could shoot. Mail delivery was infrequent. They worked seven days a week, around the clock in summer, and many went a year or more without leave. Yet morale was high according to the Virginia engineer: "We made about five miles a day, had to move camp every two or three days. Ours was the first cat (bulldozer) to cross the border and everybody climbed on. We were supposed to meet the 18th [Regiment] coming up from the south. When they didn't show it, we kept on going."
Well over a million service personnel and civilian employees of the military...were brought to Hawaii by reason of war. Among those men and women were approximately 30,000 people of African descent--soldiers, sailors, war workers. They came to a place that, before World War II, had no "Negro Problem," in part because few people on the islands recognized that "Negroes" lived in Hawaii. In 1940, according to one estimate by the territorial government, approximately 200 "Negroes of American birth" lived on the islands... Most people on Hawaii did not bring the racist ways of the mainland into there daily lives. They did stereotype one another: many Americans of Japanese ancestry looked down on the Chinese, and often upon the haoles [whites]. The Chinese looked down on the Filipinos. Round and round it went. Each ethnic group had its suspicions of the others and definite hierarchies existed. But such prejudices were not the white heat of the mainland's rigid caste society. The lines were less absolute... It helped that no one group held a majority... Hawaii was much more progressive on the issue of race than the rest of the U.S. The men and women who came to Hawaii from the mainland were uniformly shocked by what they found. On the streets of Honolulu or in small towns on the Big Island, "white" ness was not the natural condition. All newcomers were surprised, but reactions varied. Some praised what they saw...others were mightily upset by it; still others just confused... Writing home in private letters to family and friends, wives and sweethearts, black men who had come to Hawaii as servicemen or war workers discussed the possibilities of Hawaii's wartime racial liminality. A shipyard worker wrote: "I thank God often for letting me experience the occasion to spend a part of my life in a part of the world were one can be respected and live as a free man should." Another young man tried to explain to his girlfriend: "Honey, its just as much difference between over here and down there as it is between night and day." He concluded: Hawaii "will make anybody change their minds about living down there." "Down there" was the Jim Crow South, the place about which a third man wrote, "I shall never go back." White men and women from the mainland also saw the possible implications of Hawaii's racial landscape: "They have come as near to solving the race problem as any place in the world," wrote a nurse. "I'm a little mystified by it as yet but it doesn't bother anyone who had lived here awhile." A teacher found it world shaking: "I have gained here at least the impulse to fight racial bigotry and boogeyism. My soul has been stretched here and my notion of civilization and Americanism broadened." Not everyone was so inspired. One hardened soul, in Hawaii with her husband and children, wrote the folks: "Down here they have let down the standards, there does not seem to be any race hatred, there is not even any race distinction... I don't want to expose our children too long to these conditions." A white man wrote back home: "Imagine that the South will have some trouble ahead when these black bastards return. Over here they're on the equal with everyone... They're in paradise and no fooling." Others made it clear they did not believe the trouble would keep: "Boy the niggers are sure in their glory over here...they almost expect white people to step off the streets and let them walk by... They are going to overstep their bounds a little too far one of these days and those boys from the South are going to have a little necktie party." If Hawaii was "paradise"...there was a snake in this paradise, too. "As you know," one man wrote back to the mainland, "most sailors are from Texas and the South. They are most[ly] Navy men here, and they have surely poisoned everyone against the Negro..with tales of Negroes carrying dreadful diseases, being thieves, murderers and downright no good." * * *
When the 369th Coast Artillery Regiment (The Harlem Hellfighters) were transported to their initial base camp on the little sugar cane railroad, people reacted to them as if they were some kind of invading force. People ran away, frightened of the train full of black men. It didn't take long to figure out what had happened. Local people had been repeatedly warned by white soldiers and sailors from the South that blacks were literally dangerous animals. Local women, in particular, refused to have social relations with African American men. Ernest Golden, a war worker at Pearl Harbor, remembers that women would never sit next to him--or any other black man--on buses. "They had been told by the Southerners...that, first of all, Blacks were not to be trusted. [They] went so far as to say that Blacks had tails, and if they had a baby, the baby would be a monkey and all that sort of garbage. So...you'd get on the bus and sit down and she would make sure that she just got up and left. She just wouldn't let you sit next to her..." In letters back home, black servicemen fumed about the spread of racial hatred. "They preach to the natives a nasty, poisonous doctrine that we must fight like hell to overcome. They tell the native that we are ignorant dumb, evil, rapers, and troublemakers. They have the native women to a point they are afraid to even speak to our Negro boys." The responses of the local people to the black malihini (newcomers) were complex and somewhat unpredictable. Although some sociologists at the time speculated that the local population would not accept negroes...in fact local men often lent their support to blacks against whites.... This is not to say that the propaganda of African American inferiority had no effect... Local women wrote frequently of their fears. "I am very scared of these Negro soldiers here in Honolulu. They make my skin shrivel and myself afraid to go near them," wrote a Chinese girl. A young Japanese woman wrote in almost identical terms: "They are so big and dark...Seeing them around while I'm alone gives me the 'goose-flesh.'" Another Japanese woman was a little more reflective about her feelings. After sharing a perfectly uneventful bus ride with four black soldiers she wrote a friend: "Gee, I was very frightened... Funny isn't it how I am about them. One would be that way after hearing lots of nasty things about them." Some local women recognized the unfairness of local fears. One young woman of Japanese ancestry, writing in a private letter, criticized her peers: "They are going to have a dance for colored boys...only 18 girls are willing to go--such cooperation. Imagine us here talking about color equality and when it come to those things, not enough cooperation. I sure would like to have gone to it...but you know Mother." Source: Beth Bailey and David Farber, "The 'Double-V' Campaign in World War II Hawaii: African Americans, Racial Ideology, and Federal Power," Journal of Social History 26:4 (Summer 1993:818-821, 825-827. Yüklə 100,3 Kb. Dostları ilə paylaş:
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